Braxton Bragg

Braxton Bragg (22 March 1817-27 September 1876) was a General of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War who was a veteran of the Second Seminole War and Mexican-American War. During the war he commanded the Army of Tennessee from August 1862 to December 1863 and commander of Confederate forces in Wilmington from October 1864 to January 1865; he thereafter was a corps commander under Joseph E. Johnston.

Biography
Bragg was born in Warrenton, North Carolina, and attended West Point in 1837, graduating 5th out of 50 cadets and was made a Second Lieutenant in the 2nd US Artillery. Lieutenant Bragg fought the Seminoles in Florida in 1840 and from 1846 to 1848 fought in the Mexican-American War against Mexico. He was promoted to Colonel for the Battle of Buena Vista in 1847 and Fort Bragg in North Carolina was named for him. Before the American Civil War, he was made a Colonel in the state militia of North Carolina, and on 11 January 1861 he led 500 Confederate troops to force Baton Rouge's arsenal to surrender. In September he was promoted to Major General of the Confederate States Army, and commanded the CSA Army in Pensacola, Florida, before taking command of the Trans-Mississippi Department in December. Bragg fought in the Battle of Shiloh and many other battles in the West in the states of Tennessee or Kentucky, and on 31 July 1862 he devised a plan for a campaign into Kentucky. At the Battle of Perryville his forces were defeated and in the Battle of Stones River in December 1862-January 1863 his army was defeated again in Tennessee.



Bragg was forced to retreat to Chattanooga during the Tullahoma Campaign, in which Union general William S. Rosecrans pushed his army south to the Tennessee-Georgia border with few losses on both sides. He eventually evacuated Chattanooga, as D.H. Hill was evicted in September 1863. But Bragg drew together 65,000 troops and won a costly victory at the Battle of Chickamauga against Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland on 20 September 1863, driving the Union back to Chattanooga, where he laid siege to them. Bragg laid siege to the Union until Ulysses S. Grant took command of the army and led a counterattack that forced Bragg and the Confederates to retreat. Bragg was relieved of command in December and replaced by Joseph E. Johnston, and he was sent to Richmond as an adviser for President Jefferson Davis from January to October 1864. When Robert E. Lee became General-in-Chief of the Confederate States Army, Bragg was sent to Wilmington, North Carolina to oversee the defense of the forts along Cape Hatteras from John M. Schofield's Army of the Frontier. In the Second Battle of Fort Fisher in January 1865, Bragg performed poorly and became a corps commander of the Army of Tennessee under Johnston. When Davis fled to the south, Bragg had been left with only a few bodyguards and convinved Davis that the cause was lost. On May 9, 1865, Bragg was captured in Monticello, Georgia, and was paroled by the Union army.

After the war, he worked as an insurance agent, but quit because it was low-paying. In 1871 he was hired by the city of Mobile, Alabama, to improve the river and natural issues, but fought with the capitalists and eventually oversaw railroads in Texas. While in Galveston, he collapsed while talking with a friend on the streets of the city, dying of organic disease of the heart at the age of 59.